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Tinto Talks #6 - April 3rd, 2024

Welcome to the sixth Tinto Talks, where we talk about the design and features of our not yet announced game, with the codename ‘Project Caesar’.

Hey, before jumping into todays topic, I would like to show something very fresh out of the oven, based on your feedback last week. This is why we are doing these Tinto Talks, to make Project Caesar your game as much as ours...

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Today we will delve into three concepts that are rather new to our games, but first, we’ll talk about locations a bit more.

Not every location on the map is the same, especially not in a game of such scope as Project Caesar. By default, every ownable land location is a rural settlement, but there are two “upgrades” to it that can be done. First, you can find a town in a location, which allows you to increase the population capacity of the location and allows for a completely different set of buildings than a rural settlement. Finally, you can grant city rights to a town, which allows for even further advantages. Now you may wonder, why don’t I make every location into cities? Besides the cost and the population requirement, there is also the drawback that each of them tend to reduce your food production, while also adding more nobles, clergy and lots of burghers to your country.

Stockholm, Dublin and Belgrade are examples of towns at the start of the game, while cities include places like Beijing, Alexandria and Paris.

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Here you can see the control that Sweden currently has.

Control
Every location that you own has a control value, which is primarily determined by the proximity it has to the capital, or another source of authority in your country. There are only a few things that can increase it above the proximity impact, but many things that can decrease it further.

This is probably the most important value you have, as it determines how much value you can get out of a location, as it directly impacts how much you can tax the population in that location, and the amount of levies they will contribute when called. A lack of control, reduces the crown power you gain from its population, while also reduces the potential manpower and sailors you can get, and weakens the market attraction of your own markets, making them likelier to belong to foreign markets if they have too low control.


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Proximity
So what is proximity? It is basically a distance to capital value, where traveling on the open sea is extremely costly. Proximity is costly over land, but along coastlines where you have a high maritime presence you can keep a high proximity much further. Tracing proximity along a major river reduces the proximity cost a fair bit, and if you build a road network that will further reduce the proximity costs.

There are buildings that you can build, like a Bailiff that will act as a smaller proximity source, but that has the slight drawback of adding more nobles to the location, and with a cost in food for them.

Maritime Presence
In every coastal location around your locations, or where you have special buildings, you have a maritime presence. This is slowly built up over time based on your ports and other buildings you have in adjacent locations. Placing a navy in the location helps improve it quicker, but blockades and pirates will decrease it quickly, making it absolutely vital to protect your coastlines in a war, or you’ll suffer the consequences for a long time.

As mentioned earlier, the maritime presence impacts the proximity calculations, but it also impacts the power of your merchants in the market the seazone is a part of.

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Stay tuned, next week we’ll be doing an overview of the economy system, which has quite a lot of new features, as well as features from older games.
 
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yes, there will be some tiny remnants left..
1) What about hellenism? Will there a way for hellenic religion to come back to life?
2) And, since we mentioned pagan religions, will there be any pagan religions in Europe?
3) Will polytheistic religions have unique mechanics?
 
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I wonder what our options for interacting with minority religions (Norse remnants in Scandinavia, Zoroastrians in Persia etc.) are. Can we somehow promote their growth and eventually switch to a different religion this way (similar in effect, but not in mechanic to the EU4 "provoke zealot rebels -> let them run around your country converting provinces -> accept demands")? Or does the more grounded design of Project Ceasar mean that the only options are to oppress them or let them be?
That's gonna HAVE to be in a dlc.

One because you can't expect them to make religious mechanics for minority religions right off the bat. Two because you know people will shell out for the alt-hist path where you turn norse and do viking raids.
 
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How woll control work for newly conquered territories? Will they start out at 0% control and then rise to their "natural" control level over time or be at their "natural" control level immediately?
 
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A quick question, i don't think i missed anybody else having it answered, but are there 3d wrapped gui models present in this game?

My worst fear from the current early presentation, please try not to take this the wrong way. Is that this title could be a smartphone game (an extremely advanced one) because the UI is very flat for that kind of format that would fit finger-pinching click actions and large UI buttons.
A smartphone won't be able to run this for many years
 
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Will we be able to set sound dues and blockade rivers and straits if we have enough maritime presence and control the entrance to the river/straits? If so, this could lead to new casus belli and peace agreements, like Sweden being free of the Øresund sound dues or getting Denmark to blockade Sweden's enemies for some time. It could also possibly have an effect on countries' merchants and relations
 
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Can a populous Rural Settlement or Town make a petition to upgrade their Location status? And if you ignore it, is there any consequence?

Can a Town or City that is bigger or richer than your Capital make demands such as lowering Taxes or Manpower? Will they eventually rebel if you do not listen to their demands?
 
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I really love the idea of control - it absolutely increases the importance of maritime during peace in exactly the ways I hoped. I do wonder if control is taken into account during wartime, as if your armies exert control over enemy lands and whether that affects army attrition or its equivalent?

The one thing that's on my mind with this is Johan's statements that there's no advantages to low control and that high control is always good. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding 'control' as a concept, but while I like this uniform standard from a gameplay perspective, it seems to push players toward a totalitarian model of government. Are there mechanics which make a more federated sense of control as with a Republic more appealing? I feel like in *unrelated* game EU4, republics just kind of got worse as the meta evolved, and especially as a player who's into the roleplay/historical aspect, I really hope there will be more reasons to convert one's government to a more democratic one beyond the parliament system earlier mentioned.
 
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Is this when I say that I really enjoy Voltaire's Nightmare? :p

Taking advantage of this comment...

I'm assuming that most, if not all, of the Free Cities in the HRE will start as towns, given their population? Any chance you hint there the threshold is, if it's only about population?

If the threshold is 50k, for example, there'll be a rather short (and surprising) list of cities included (Granada in, Lisbon probably out). Or wil there be more requisites and population is just one of them?

And finally, and given free cities are one of my favorite playthroughs in EU4... will they be able to hold more than one location as long as only one of them is a town/city? As in: if I manage to make a Nuremberg managed by me grow in population, will I be able to go to war (or maybe even acquire) further rural locations around me to ensure food for my pops?
 
Imagine spending this much time on an effort post instead of reading the OP (the relevant information contained in every single TT OP).
imagine laughing at post that gives feedback when every single TT OP Johan asks for feedback o_O
 
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Will State & territories, core provinces and admin capacity be absent from the game ? It seems the control / proximity and pops make these mechanics redundant and useless.
 
Will we be able to take a loan in the land and possessions? For example, if at the start date, you take Denmark, nearly all of the land in the whole of Denmark is mortgaged to the Swedes and Germans. The king who takes control of Denmark in 1340 spends the next 20 or so years getting the kingdom under Danish hands again. Will we be able to see something like that?
 
That's gonna HAVE to be in a dlc.

One because you can't expect them to make religious mechanics for minority religions right off the bat. Two because you know people will shell out for the alt-hist path where you turn norse and do viking raids.
I think this is a bit of future DLC that will be a good thing to have since it falls outside of "the level of flavor and content" we had in DLC filled eu4.